Introduction
The rampant hype around Generative AI is almost as crazy-making as trying to comprehend NVIDIA’s market cap approaching USD 2 Trillion and exceeding that of Amazon (as of 1st April 2024). Finding value in a frothy market and deciding what technologies to bet on now is a continuous challenge, for investors and early-stage founders alike.
Please join Capria Ventures’ Managing Partner Will Poole who will lead a lively and participative workshop discussing how investors and founders can avoid being Late for the GenAI Train . Investors will learn how to identify already-good companies that are applying generative AI to make their businesses even better. Founders will learn from case studies of other founders outside of Silicon Valley are embracing GenAI now to reduce costs and improve user engagement at scale.
As the leading VC investor for applied GenAI in the Global South, Capria has built a dedicated GenAI tech development team to assist founders in accelerating their GenAI journey. In this workshop Will Poole will show you demos of what Capria and their portfolio have deployed. Will will also discuss the fundamentals of how to look at applied GenAI strategies, including avoiding “thin layer” innvoation and building effective “data moats”. He’ll also offer an analytical framework for evaluating upside and risk in GenAI-forward companies.
Note this workshop will not look at the challenges of building or investing in LLMs and associated infrastructure and tools, but we will discuss them at the high level.
Agenda
- 5 minutes – Introductions
- 15 minutes – GenAI in context of 50 years of tech disruptions; understanding the GenAI stack from silicon to services
- 15 minutes – Demos of applied GenAI solutions that have been put into production in innovative customer-facing applications, assisted by Capria
- 15 minutes – Introduction of ways to think about applying GenAI, from enhancing internal productivity to improving customer interactions to creating net-new business lines that would not be viable without GenAI
- 10 minutes – Five GenAI tools you should be deploying internally now to help you better understand the current and future potential
- 10 minutes – Demo of Capria’s Due Diligence Copilot – a custom GenAI tool to assist in DD of a complex set of documents
- 10 minutes – Overview of cloud credits and benefits offered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA, and how to get them
- 10 minutes – Talent – do startups need an experienced LLM engineer? Someone with deep learning model design experience?
- 20 minutes – A framework for evaluating a startup’s GenAI upside and risks relative to GenAI, near and long term, including analysing “data moats” and detecting “thin layer innovation”
- 10 minutes – Around the room – discuss technologies and companies you’ve invested in and/or passed on and what can be learned
Workshop Leader: Will Poole, Managing Partner, Capria Ventures
Will Poole is a serial entrepreneur and three-decade participant in the global VC ecosystem. He and his partners added applied Generative AI as a core element of their investing thesis about a week after OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT to the world in 2022.
He is currently the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Capria Ventures. He has been directly investing in startups since 1997 and developed wisdom beyond his years as he navigated the downturns of 2000 and 2008. His first institutional venture fund was raised in 2012. He and his partners together manage USD 218M in AUM in companies spanning the Global South, from São Paulo to Cairo to Bangalore to Jakarta, and soon in the GCC. A common reaction from investors and founders who learn of Capria’s captive GenAI development team accelerating their portfolio’s work is “…this is amazing — we’ve not seen any other VCs doing this anywhere.”
In his big tech career, Will was a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, leading several business lines, including the $13 billion Windows desktop business, representing ⅔ of the company profits at the time. After that role, he led the company’s efforts to tailor products to the needs of mass-market customers in emerging markets.
Will’s career started by founding two startups at the dawn of the PC era, growing a USD 200M business line in the early days at Sun Microsystems, and pioneering e-commerce at eShop, which he co-founded in 1991 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996.
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